TIMEPIECES (3)

Clocks.

There are not enough clocks in my house. Don’t get me wrong, I love clocks. Both the appearance and the sound of them are pleasures I find reassuring and calming. On some unconscious level though I must be avoiding them, because I never have enough. In fact, at the moment I have just one clock in the house. This is so woefully far away from my “clock need” that I actually have to take this clock with me around the house, carrying it from room to room.

It is partly a question of reliability. I once bought a clock to hang on the wall; it was cheap and worked via two AA batteries inserted in the back, but I was smug because I thought it looked both attractive and expensive. In the end though my aesthetic sensibilities proved impractical for the real world yet again, as a mere three months after hanging it above my desk, one of the hands developed a kind of impotence, just managing to climb it’s way up to twelve, only to suddenly and all at once descend to six, with a kind of limp despair. This happened approximately twelve years ago and I have to admit I have only bought one clock since; the “travel” clock mentioned above. This is an unattractive digital alarm clock which I bought six years ago for £7.50, to replace my previous unattractive digital alarm clock (every home should have one) and is still running on its original battery. It is useful because it is relatively small, and as well as informing me of the time, it tells me the month, day and year, should I forget them (which I do, frequently).

For no real reason, I have a preference for the 24-hour clock. There is a 24-hour clock on the dashboard of my car. It is an hour behind because I didn’t adjust it when the clocks changed in March. I keep meaning to, and every time I get into the car I am aware that I haven’t got enough time to correct the clock right at that moment, but that I must do it later. This has been happening since March, and now it is September, so there’s not really any point in doing it now, because the clocks will change again next month anyway! I like the clock in my car though; it is green (my favourite colour) and amuses me when on long journeys, as I look at the clock, then at the speedo and then back to the clock, attempting to work out those ‘problems’ we were always given in maths lessons all those years ago. Alas, I still don’t know what Henry’s average speed was when he drove to Birmingham in three hours, stopping for twenty minutes at some services for a cup of tea. Who is this Henry person anyway? And why can’t he work out his own average speed?! The clock on my mobile phone is correct, but no doubt as my car clock becomes correct in its timekeeping, my mobile-phone clock will lose an hour and I will spend the following six months thinking that I really must get round to correcting it.

I know I should have bought more clocks, but on the other hand, I already know there aren’t enough hours in the day to achieve everything I would like to, so do I really need the constant reminder staring down at me from my magnolia walls, ticking at me, rushing me along my life?

It was my previous mobile phone actually which inadvertantly caused a moment of self-realisation. I was meeting a friend in town at three o clock in the afternoon. My mobile phone, which was a dreadful pay-as-you-go about as heavy as the average house brick and looked like it had come from a toyshop, had decided to eliminate the clock feature from its display. As I did not wear a watch at the time (see Timepieces (1)), it was my phone on which I used to depend when out of the house, so this left me in a bit of a spot. I was about to leave the house and was as usual, running late, when I realised this predicament. The obvious solution to me was to grab the alarm clock which I carry round the house with me, throw it into my bag, get my car keys and go. By my logic, this was a perfectly sensible solution, and it wasn’t until I found myself waiting for my friend and I pulled out my alarm clock in the middle of a crowded street, that I stopped and thought to myself “I wonder if this is the kind of thing people mean when they say I’m eccentric.”